Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was the towering figure of French Romanticism and one of the most influential painters in the history of Western art. Where the Neoclassicists prized cool reason and line, Delacroix believed in the primacy of color and emotional intensity — his canvases explode with movement, drama, and a warmth of palette he partly derived from a formative journey to Morocco in 1832, which introduced him to a world of light he spent the rest of his life trying to capture. Works like Liberty Leading the People and The Death of Sardanapalus established him as the great painter of passion in an age that prized it, and his journals — arguably the richest written account of the creative process left by any major artist — reveal a thinker of extraordinary depth. Cézanne called him "the most suggestive of all painters," and the Impressionists recognized in his broken, vibrating brushwork the technical foundation of everything that would follow.